Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ukma!uflorida!mailrus!um-math!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: ARC for Unix
Message-ID: <647@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 25 May 89 07:14:10 GMT
References: <644@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> <14341@bfmny0.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@math.lsa.umich.edu
Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Followup-To: comp.sources.d
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
Lines: 52
UUCP-Path: {mailrus,umix}!um-math!hyc

In article <14341@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>Just to remind everyone - ZOO already runs fine on all those systems,
>has more features than ARC and is available from all the major FTP and UUCP
>archive sites.  I use it for all my on-site archiving.  If Rahul were
>as publicity hungry as what-his-name we would all be using ZOO by now.

That's a tough call... ZOO first appeared for Unix only, so it had to
compete with time-honored existing utilities (tar, cpio, and compress,
for example) for attention. Some local gurus think ARC and its ilk are
an utter waste, and violate the Unix philosophy... (Single purpose commands,
which you can connect in pipelines, such as tar -> compress.) I don't
think ZOO has languished for lack of publicity, just lack of need, or lack
of desire on the part of most Unix users.

On the other hand, ARC grew out of CP/M, and fluorished in the MessyDOS
world. Sad to say, there's a damn large number of MessyDOS machines out
there, and a large number of users using ARC. Not because of publicity
directly from SEA/Thom Henderson, but by word of mouth from satisfied
DOS users. The more recent publicity is just an after-effect of an already
established utility... It may not be a wonderful program, but for a couple
years there, ARC was the best thing around. Since ARC files are so
pervasive on the nets now, a port to other environments makes sense, even
though the program and format themselves aren't ideal for the foreign
systems. There was a distinct need for other systems to be able to manage
ARC archives, but no real need for ZOO.

Mebbe it's like the choice between uuencode and atob. atob is more
efficient, but uuencode has been around longer... I haven't looked at the
ZOO code in a long time, so I can't say if it's better or worse. Every
now and then I hear complaints about its usability though, so who knows.
I don't have a stake in this; I don't get money for it, so that doesn't
really matter. But, at least on my ST, ZOO is kind of a pain.

I'd probably want to get ZIP working on Unix though, instead of fixing up
ZOO and trying to spread it around DOS systems. To my mind, it'd be easier
to introduce a new program and set a standard for a new type of utility,
(on the Unix end) rather than introducing a new program to compete with
an existing standard (ZOO vs ZIP on MSDOS). Still, it's hard to say. ZOO
runs on my ST, ZIP doesn't. We use ZOO for some of the larger files in
our Atari archive, for this reason. ZIP seems to be emerging as a new
standard for the DOS world though, and while I don't like playing catch-up
all the time, it seems to make sense to bring what "most people" are using
to the systems that I use. Of course, "most people" is only what I see,
here at the UofM. If "most people" to you are using something else, well,
you deal with it. 

Sorry for the length. It doesn't matter much to me what you like to use,
I just wanted to say that no one program is obviously superior to another,
despite the available features...
--
 -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1]
 and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!